DEVELOPMENT-OUTLOOK 2000: Despite Pledges and Promises, Poverty On the Rise

By Thalif Deen Reprint | | Print |

Thalif Deen

UNITED NATIONS, Nov 24 1999 (IPS) - The poorest of the world’s poor – nearly 1.3 billion people living on less than a dollar a day – is expected to keep growing through the turn of the century.

By the dawn of the new millennium, the United Nations predicts that the number of people living in extreme poverty may rise to 1.5 billion out of a global population of more than 6.0 billion people.

And by 2015, the number will rise even higher, to 1.9 billion – provided there are no concerted efforts to fight poverty globally.

“Despite countless programmes and campaigns over time and across regions,” admits UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan, “poverty continues to be a major impediment to human development and economic progress.”

Annan says that the majority of the world’s poorest people live in rural areas in the developing world and depend, to a large extent, on agriculture for their livelihood and employment.

The greatest number of poor people live in Asia, he points out, but the depth of poverty, which measures how far incomes fall below the poverty line, is greater in sub-Saharan Africa than in any other region.

“In the next century,” says Annan, “a poor person is less likely to be a male smallholder in rural Asia, and more likely to be an unskilled low-wage female worker in urban Africa or Latin America.”

The UN’s Deputy Secretary-General Louise Frechette admits that the fight against poverty is emerging as “one of the greatest challenges of the times.”

She says that poverty alleviation will likely be one of the major themes of the Millennium Summit scheduled to take place in New York in September 2000 when more than 175 world leaders will approve a global plan of action for the 21st century.

Frechette says the eradication of poverty should also be a major issue engaging all the energies of the United Nations and its sister institutions, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).

In 1996, the UN General Assembly declared 1997-2006 “The United Nations Decade for the Eradication of Poverty.” The primary objective of this exercise was to “eradicate absolute poverty” by 2006 and “reduce overall poverty substantially in the world.”

The United Nations has also set a global target of halving the number of poor people by the year 2015.

But Annan says this target now seems “daunting” because the fight against poverty is being increasingly hampered by regional financial crises, military conflicts in Africa and Asia, rising Third World debts and a sharp decline in development assistance from the North to the South.

In a report on poverty released in September, the United Nations singles out Africa as a region where prospects to reduce poverty “remain weak.”

Although Africa experienced less contagion from the Asian financial crisis (with the exception of South Africa), the already poverty-stricken region has been hit by declining commodity prices, slower world trade growth and increased competition from countries with depreciated exchange rates.

All of this – along with AIDS epidemic, civil strife and high- level corruption – have severely impeded economic growth, worsening the state of poverty in sub-Saharan Africa.